Good piece on trappings of ‘Big Data’

The second hurdle is the so-called averaging of data. This produces the phenomenon which you can call “I don’t know you, but I know your type”. It’s what cookies do. The end result is a sort of spurious intimacy, correct up to a point but ultimately wrong in that it fails to capture your real essence or soul – an essence that may never be captured because there is no data for that.